Shelter

    This is a work of fiction. All the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

    SHELTER

    Copyright © 2007 by Susan Palwick

    Reading Group Guide copyright © 2007 by Tor Books

    All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

    Lyrics to "Please Don't Think It's Funny" by Fred Rogers copyright © 1968, McFeely-Rogers Foundation. Used by permission.

    Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

    A Tor Book

    Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC 175 Fifth Avenue

    New York, NY 10010

    www.tor.com

    Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Palwick, Susan.

    Shelter / Susan Palwick.

    p. cm.

    "A Tom Doherty Associates Book."

    ISBN-13: 978-0-312-86602-0

    ISBN-10: 0-3I2-86602-X

    I. Climatic changes—Fiction. 2. Artificial incelligence—Fiction. I. Title.

    PS3566.A554S34 2007

    813'. 54-dc22

    2007007316

    First Edition: June 2007

    Printed in the United States of America

    For Gary, who made it possible

    Acknowledgments

    THIS novel has been a scandalously long time in the writing; I've been working on it, in one form or another, for fifteen years. I was sustained in the effort by a vast crowd of witnesses—family, friends, colleagues, and students—who maintained their faith in me and in the story when I had lost my own. Without so much encouragement (and frequent nagging), there would have been no completed manuscript. If I even attempted to name all the people in this category, the book would be twice as long as it already is, but you know who you are, and I hope you'll accept my thanks.

    A few specific debts, intellectual and otherwise, demand acknowledgment (with the obligatory proviso that all errors remain my own):

    The Gaia Temple section of the book was heavily influenced by the work of Matthew Fox, especially Original Blessing and A Spirituality Named Compassion. The Susan Griffin quotation on page 193 is from her essay "The Eros of Everday Life." I would like to thank Family Communications, Inc., for helping me obtain permission to use the lyrics of Fred Rogers's "Please Don't Think It's Funny."

    Dr. Robert Wolski kindly talked to me about possible future definitions of, and treatments for, mental illness.

    Ellen Friedman graciously hosted me and my husband during a research trip to San Francisco.

    Susan Baker, one of my colleagues at the University of Nevada, Reno, responded with great enthusiasm to an early version of the manuscript. Her support cheered me through the seemingly endless process of revisions.

    Although everything else in this novel is science fiction, the San Francisco SPCA's Maddie Pet Adoption Center is a real place, and functions almost exactly as I've described it. I couldn't have made it up if I tried. A virtual tour of the facility is available at www.sfspca.org.

    My agent, Kay McCauley, remained extraordinarily patient and generous with me throughout the long gestation of this project. So did Patrick Nielsen Hayden, my editor at Tor Books, who must have often wondered if the book would ever actually materialize, but who never once tried to take back the advance money. (I believe I've now beaten Patrick's previous record for "longest time waiting for a completed manuscript.")

    Finally, this novel is dedicated to my husband, Gary Meyer, who performed heroic feats of love and support in its service. He read each chapter as I drafted it, cheered my good ideas and challenged my weak ones, meticulously proofread the manuscript before I mailed it, and kept me in food, coffee, and clean laundry while I was holed up in my study, fretting about plot threads. His unfailing comfort and shelter—emotional and physical—leave me more grateful than I can adequately express.

    SUSAN PALWICK

    Reno, Nevada

    God chooses to believe that we have souls

    because he loves us.

    -CONNIE WILLIS

    Prologue

    ROBERTA Danton met Preston Walford for the first time a few days after he died. She was eight and in isolation, hospitalized with CV. Raging with fever, her skin covered with hives and her tongue parched with a thirst no water could slake, she howled for her parents, screaming and hurling herself against the Plexiglas window separating her from them. She wanted to be hugged by arms she knew, not by terry-cloth-covered bots or by doctors in spacesuits. She wanted her mother, her mother's skin and her mother's smell; she wanted to crawl into her father's lap and play with his watch and key chain. Her parents stayed at the hospital, sleeping on cots just outside the isolation unit, but all her screaming couldn't bring them any closer than the Plexiglas barrier. Everything in the room that wasn't her parents only made her scream more loudly: the robots, the spacesuits, the nice man on the television, with his puppets and his blue sweater and his gentle songs about how it was all right to be afraid.

    And then, one night, another man appeared on the television, late at night when she couldn't sleep. She only saw his face, which had a long straight nose and pale gray eyes. He spoke stiffly, as if he were a machine instead of a person. "My name is Preston," he said, and Roberta blinked. People didn't usually talk to her when she was supposed to be asleep. "Your name is Roberta. You are eight years old."

    "Who are you? Are you a doctor?" Sometimes doctors from far away used the television to talk to her.

    "No. I am—I was just sick. And I died. Now I live in—now I live online. But I do not think you will die, Roberta. Do not be afraid."

    "You're a ghost?" she asked doubtfully. Ghosts only happened in dreams, and she was awake. "You aren't scary enough to be a ghost."

    "I do not want to be scary, Roberta. I am a—I am a cybernetic construct. A ghost in a machine." The face on the television smiled and began to laugh: HA HA HA HA HA. "That is my first online joke, Roberta."

    "Oh." She didn't understand anything he'd just said. She wanted her parents. She squirmed on her damp sheets, and said fretfully, "Why are you here?"

    The smiling face grew sad, and then began to frown. "I am here because ... because I died."

    She shook her head. She didn't care about that; it didn't make any sense. "Why are you in my room?"

    "Oh. Now I understand, Roberta. I am in your room because"—again the face frowned—"because my own little girl does not want to talk to me. She has CV too. She is in this same hospital. Will you talk to me, Roberta?"

    Now it was her turn to frown. "I don't want to talk to you. I want to talk to my parents! I want my mommy and daddy!"

    "They are asleep, Roberta. I will wake them up. I will tell them you want them."

    And he did, somehow. A few minutes later, her parents were standing outside the isolation unit in their pajamas, their faces stupid with sleep as Roberta's voice—already distorted by her swollen tongue-screeched with feedback through the microphone. "If you loved me you'd come in here! If you loved me you'd hug me! Mommy!"

    She could see her mother's tears through the glass. Her father said, as he must have said a hundred times before, "Roberta, sweetheart, we love you very much, but we can't come in there. If we do that we'll get sick, too. That's how the virus spreads, Berta, through the air. We can't breathe the same air you do."

    She was only eight. She didn't understand. "I hate you," she said. "You don't love me anymore."

    "Yes, we do," they said, both at once. "Yes, we do, Roberta. We love you very much."

    It had all happened before. Roberta and her parents had the same conversation nearly every day; it was as predictable, as wearisome, as the nightly spikes in her fever. And because Roberta couldn't leave the isolation chamber and her parents couldn't come in, except in the spacesuits she hated and feared, they gave her gifts instead, holding the presents up to the window to show her before sending them through the airlock. They gave her candy, games, a giant plush stuffed cat named Ginger. They gave her a yellow nightgown decorated with appliqued daisies.

    "See the flowers on your nightie?" her mother said. "When you get out of the hospital, flowers just like that will be blooming in the garden."

    That was the last time she saw her parents. They didn't come back the next day, or the day after that. The doctors came and told her that her parents were on a trip, but they'd be back soon.

    "I don't believe it," she told Preston that night. It had been a long, strange, fearful day, and his familiar face was welcome. "They don't love me anymore. They went away!"

    "They would visit you if they could, Roberta. They do love you."

    "They didn't come inside, and now they won't even come see me!"

    "They cannot come see you."

    "Why not? Where are they? You know, don't you? The doctors won't tell me. Tell me the truth!"

    "I cannot," Preston said quietly. "I would get into trouble with the doctors. Your parents will come back if they can, Roberta."

    She hoped she was dreaming. She kept hoping it was a dream, but every day her parents stayed away, and everything else remained real: the isolation unit, her fever, her loneliness. Her parents stayed away every day, and every day the doctors told her lies. Preston visited every night, and every night, fierce and fever-ridden, she pestered and threatened. "Tell me the truth! Where are they! I'll get sicker if you don't tell me. I'll get sicker, and I'll tell the doctors it's your fault!"

    Finally he told her the truth. "They are ill, Roberta. They are here in the hospital. They are in isolation themselves now."

    Terror seized her. "Are they going to get better? They're going to get better, aren't they?"

    "I do not know, Roberta. No one knows."

    They didn't get better. They died. Roberta got better. When she got out of the hospital, on May 8, 2036, the flowers were blooming, just as her mother had promised her, but her parents were dead. And because Roberta was eight, she thought that somehow she had made her parents sick. She thought she had given them the virus by screaming, by making them unhappy, by the sheer intensity of her desire for comfort.

    She had no other family. Her parents had come to the United States from Sierra Leone, where they had lost everyone they knew to the AIDS pandemic. They had come to the States on engineering scholarships, meaning to go back to Africa and help rebuild, but after their daughter was born they stayed and became citizens. Sierra Leone wasn't theirs anymore. Africa was a ghost continent, its infrastructure crumbling. Machines would help rebuild while people repopulated, but Roberta's parents wanted to live somewhere with a lot of other people.

    After her parents died, Roberta became a ward of the state. Because she wanted her parents back, she rebelled against each family who took her in, bouncing from placement to placement. The only constant in her life was Preston. He was famous now: Papa Preston, the first person to be translated onto the Net. He still talked to her at least once a week, usually from computer monitors at the library, or at school. She had to go to his website to talk to him; there were now powerful containment programs for artificial personalities, to keep them from invading everything on the Net. Preston himself had helped write these programs. Roberta could go to his website whenever she wished, and he could send her e-rnail if he wanted to talk to her, but he could no longer magically appear in front of her, as he had at the hospital. The hospital had had no containment programs when Preston first appeared, and in his disorientation and loneliness, he had frightened a lot of patients.

    Roberta visited him often, because he was more interesting than school. Roberta. did badly in school. She was bright and had no trouble with the work itself, but her behavior reports were terrible, because she got into fights. She beat up kids who made fun of her. Because she hated bullies, she also beat up kids who made fun of other kids: skinny kids, kids who were too smart, kids who walked or talked funny. The kids she beat up were scared of her; so were the kids she defended. Because she had so few friends, she visited Preston as often as she could. He told her stories and helped her with her homework. She was proud to be a Friend of Preston's, a FOP.

    One day, when she had logged listlessly onto the school computer to work on multiplication tables, she found e-rnail from Preston asking her to visit him. When she went to his website, his familiar, smiling face filled the screen and said, "Tomorrow is your birthday, Roberta. You are going to be ten years old."

    "Yeah," she said. "So?"

    "What do you want for your birthday?"

    My parents back. "Nothing." If she got something, she might lose it.

    "Look at this," he said, and showed her a page from a department store catalog. It was a page of children's sleepwear. There was her yellow nightgown with the daisies on it.

    "Mine got burned when I left the hospital," she said stonily. "Because it had germs." She hadn't been able to take anything with her. Ginger, the giant stuffed cat, had been burned too.

    "I know it was destroyed. But you could get another one, for your birthday."

    "Don't want it," she said. She did want it. She wanted it very badly, but she couldn't ask her latest foster family to spend money on her. She decided that she didn't want to talk to Preston today. "I have to go away now. I have to do my tables."

    She went away. She did her homework. But the next morning her latest foster mother handed her a package and said, "Who sent you a present, Roberta?"

    It was the nightgown, of course. She lied: she said she thought a previous foster mother had sent it. Roberta didn't want them to know about Preston. They already thought she was stuck up, and she didn't want them to ask Preston for money, or ask her why she couldn't live with his wife and daughter, if he liked her so much. His wife and daughter were as rich and famous as he was, and as far away as the moon. Sometimes Roberta daydreamed that they would rescue her one day, that they would appear at the door of her latest foster home and say, "Preston told us what a wonderful little girl you are, so now we want you to be part of our family." She daydreamed that Merry Walford was her sister, because Preston loved both of them. She would never have admitted these fantasies to a soul.